Victoria Jackson: I’m Even Crazier than Clint Eastwood

Turns out Clint Eastwood wasn’t the only crazy person at last week’s Republican National Convention. Far, far further on the talent scale (as in not having any), former Saturday Night Live bit player, Victoria Jackson, who has evolved into a far-Right, Tea Party slurping bubblehead, trolled the convention floor hoping someone might notice her craziness in a sea of crazy people and put a microphone in front of her.

Unfortunately, someone did, and the ukelele-playing, ditz blurted out her opinion on Rep. Todd Akin’s brain fart about “legitimate rape.” To the shock of absolutely no one , Jackson. a stupider and chubbier version of Sarah Palin, didn’t see what was the fuss over Akin’s remarks.

“The Todd Akin thing was so blown out of proportion — it’s a joke,” Jackson said. “How many times do people get pregnant from rape? It’s point zero zero one percent. It’s a joke. I read lots of articles. I know people, because I’m 53. I’ve known a lot of people, and I’ve actually never known anyone who got pregnant from being raped.”

“And guess what?” she continued. “If I got raped, I would have the baby. And if I didn’t want to keep it because I had these [mocking tone] horrible nightmares, I would adopt it out. But I think that God can turn a bad thing into a good thing. And that, if I got raped and a beautiful baby who was innocent was born out of it, that would be a blessing. The DNA of a baby is individual. It’s not the mother’s DNA. It’s not the father’s DNA. And that’s why I believe abortion is murder, because it’s not the woman’s body. It has it’s own DNA. If there’s a boy baby inside of me, he has a penis. That’s not my body.”

Jackson is another entry in the list of has-beens like Jon Voight, Ted Nugent, Chuck Norris and Hank Williams, Jr., who have gone public with their dislike of President Obama, but at least Voight, Nugent, Norris and Williams had a career at one time to be has-beens now. Jackson has always been a small-timer who had her chances in television and movies to make it big. It never happened for her because she lacked the one thing necessary to take that next big step: a shred of talent.

Making statements that are provocative, off-putting, uninformed and just plain off the wall is a growth industry on the Far Right and that is Jackson’s claim to fame. There have been many Not Ready For Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live and for every Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Chris Rock or Adam Sandler that used the show to go on to greater success, there are the Victoria Jacksons who go right back to the obscurity they were plucked from.

…when she flew to New York in 1986 to audition for SNL, executive producer Lorne Michaels curled his lower lip and lamented her lack of comedic characters. So the next time she was on Carson’s show, she continued the audition by doing impressions of Diana Ross and Edith Bunker and inventing a character: a glum boss interviewing Carson for a job. She joined the SNL cast that season. With a fire-eater and new baby in tow, she bought a four-bedroom Colonial in Weston, Connecticut; hired a nanny; and commuted to Manhattan by train.

Coming up with characters and premises for skits was a supreme struggle. She confesses that one of her funnier sketches — “Victoria’s Secrets,” in which she wore lingerie and throatily fumbled at being sexy — was a product of begging castmate Jon Lovitz and writer Conan O’Brien for ideas as they walked down an office hallway.

Critics and former castmates haven’t been kind. Nerve.com recently ranked her dead last of 92 all-time cast members and wrote that her “cute-ditsy-idiot act got pretty thin, [and] it turns out it wasn’t an act.” And in the 2002 book Live From New York, an oral history of the show, castmate Jan Hooks sniped, “I just have a particular repulsion to grown women who talk like little girls. It’s like, ‘You’re a grown woman! Use your lower register!'” (Victoria, by the way, claims her weird voice is the result of a medical defect: a “congenital palatal insufficiency.” )

But Hartman didn’t want to talk about the Son of God. And Lovitz asked how Jesus, “a grown man,” could have fit in his mother’s womb to be born again. When Victoria left audiocassette box sets of the Bible in each castmate’s mail slot for Christmas, they were angrily returned.

Writer and performer Al Franken, now a Democratic U.S. senator for Minnesota, cornered her once, Victoria says. He said he was “offended” by her “ditsy” act. “Maybe I’m overcompensating,” she retorted, “because everybody here is dying and going to Hell, and I’m supposed to tell them about Jesus.”

Franken went white, she says. “He never talked to me again.”

I can’t imagine why the Jewish Franken wouldn’t want to talk to a proselytizing idiot who mails Bibles to other cast members telling them they’re going to hell.

I give Jackson for taking her minimal talents and getting maximum mileage out of them, but the woman is a fool and nothing but foolishness spills out of her stupid mouth. But getting mad about what a crazy person says makes no sense. Not this sad little loser or old guys that talk to chairs.

Victoria Jackson saying stupid stuff is like the pigeon that sits in a tree and shits all over your just washed car. It just gonna do what it does. It has been speculated may Jackson is trying to pull off a bizarre bit of Sasha Baron Cohen performance where he plays a role to the max like Bruno, Ali G., and Borat, but I doubt it. She doesn’t seem to have Cohen’s mad genius for occupying a character in a believable way. Jackson is content to be a Tea Party princess happily bubbling away with her insipid observations about people she doesn’t know and issues she doesn’t understand.
Even Tito Jackson is more relevant than Victoria Jackson.

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One thought on “Victoria Jackson: I’m Even Crazier than Clint Eastwood”

I think part of what made Victoria Jackson’s “bits” interesting on SNL, as the viewer, was trying to figure out if she was as dumb as the characters she portrayed. I thought to myself: No, she’s only pretending to be an idiot; right?

Turns out, she was that dumb and crazy. She might as well hang out with Chuck Norris and his wife who issued a video statement September 1 warning America about the thousand years of darkness that we will descend into if Obama is elected. (I’m not kidding. This is real.)

The woman is not right in the head, and she is a living example of the schism within the Republican party. Right-wing fundamentalists have hijacked the GOP leaving the intelligent, thoughtful conservatives without a home. I believe that we need at least two parties for balance; it’s sad that the lunatics have taken over.